Brazil’s fight against modern slavery has been held up as an example by labor rights advocates from Free the Slaves to the U.S. Department of Labor to the UN’s International Labor Organization. Its effort has been ambitious (the goal is total eradication of modern slavery), courageous (websites have been hacked, activists threatened, inspectors killed), creative […]
When we learned more than two years ago that Brazil’s government had cited 15 coffee farms for profiting from modern slavery, we asked our partner Repórter Brasil to help us understand whether those farms contained the full universe of cases of modern slavery in the country’s coffee sector, or whether they were representative of a […]
The current issue of Vanity Fair features this inspiring profile of one our partners in the fight against modern slavery in Brazil. The author ably summarizes modern slavery like this: “[It] differs from classic chattel slavery, in which people are held as private property, but to the extent that it treats people as tools to […]
The Atlantic slave trade left a ruinous legacy everywhere, but in the Americas, perhaps no country was more affected than Brazil. During a ghastly period of more than 300 years, estimates suggest that somewhere between four and five million slaves were delivered to its shores by slave traders—more than one-third of all Africans dragged to […]
During the summer of 2013, we learned quite by accident that 15 coffee estates in Brazil were included in the government’s “Dirty List,” an official registry of farms and firms found to be profiting from what the country’s laws define as modern-day slavery. We turned for insight to a long-time CRS partner in São Paulo […]
Last summer, researchers at the Danish human rights organization Danwatch published this story about labor rights violations in the coffee sector in Brazil. The authors argue that the problem “has its roots in the fact that some people believe that it is ok to exploit others to increase their own gain.” We won’t argue that […]
Yesterday our friends at the Specialty Coffee Association of America uploaded this video of my Colombia Sensory Trial presentation to Re:co Symposium in Gothenburg, Sweden, in June. . . It was the second time in three months I had the opportunity to deliver to industry leaders the results of our sensory research collaboration with the […]
Last week, SCAA gave me the opportunity to talk about water and coffee at its annual Symposium in Seattle. For my first contribution to the Coffeelands blog, I want to give a brief synthesis of last week’s presentation, which serves as a great intro to water and the coffeelands. . . WATER CRISIS In 2015, […]
Yesterday I had the honor to present the preliminary results of the Colombia Sensory Trial at the 2015 SCAA Symposium. The Colombia Sensory Trial is a cross-sector collaboration with allies in the research community (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Kansas State University and World Coffee Research), industry (Counter Culture, Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, George […]
The 27th SCAA Event opens one month from today, which means it’s time for my annual SCAA preview and picks for the show’s best origin content. This year’s preview, which ran a little longer than last year’s, is thematic in focus. If you are in a hurry, or prefer a chronological format that presents the […]
